We will continue to fight to protect our rights as American citizens and the rights of all people worldwide to live in peace. This is what democracy looks like.
This is the final statement of a letter from a member of Women Against War that I posted. It deserves repeating because the message tends to get lost in the confusing “support the troops; oppose the war” rhetoric.
We must continue to “fight” for peace — not with physical force, but with open, public, non-violent, articulate protest. We must fight by becoming involved in trying to affect local policies and politics. We must fight with more than peaceful words; we fight with non-violent actions. While words have power, until that power is used to craft and implement intelligent action, the power of words is simply potential.
We must continue to “fight” with protests that are peaceful, orderly, organized, and informed. If the choice is made for civil disobedience, it must be made recognizing that there are consequences to breaking the law. We must continue the widespread sharing of both factual and personally-experienced information from around the world; this kind of information is fundamental to empowering the ordinary citizen to understand his/her choices and to make those choices only after critical and compassionate analysis and discussion.
That is how we fight we for freedom — by modeling democratic methods. That’s what will change the world into a planet of collaborating democracies. Not war. Not physical force. Not propaganda. Not even intellectual arguments. But by modeling — both individually and nationally — what we expect others to emulate.
This is what democracy looks like.